Walasse Ting

Six American Paintings

Exhibition in Copenhagen, June and August 2026

"If one were to ask these 28 artists – and many, many others – about Walasse Ting’s place in contemporary art, one could be absolutely sure of a very flattering result for Walasse.

The vast majority of those I have had the opportunity to discuss this thought experiment with have even gone so far – that in their homes and studios you can only find their and Walasse’s works. In my opinion, this is a very big guarantee for many of us who place such high value on this very personal and extremely distinctive artist. Walasse Ting only exhibits in museums and in the absolute best galleries in Europe and the USA. And when it is today possible to see such an exclusive exhibition in a newly opened gallery in Randers, it is due to my long-standing friendship with Walasse Ting and with Erik Johannesen, whom I wish all possible luck and happiness in the future."

Børge Birch, Walasse Ting exhibition catalogue, Galerie Nord 1975

Galerie birch is proud to present six painted works by the Chinese-American artist and poet Walasse Ting. A selection of canvases painted at the height of the artist’s international career. They represent not only some of Walasse Ting’s best work, but are, just as importantly, signature pieces in terms of style and subject matter. The female form, whether scantily clad or completely disrobed, is a central motif for four of the canvases on display, three of which date from the 1970s and one, a vivid, almost life-size nude bathed in floral motifs, from 1985. A very large canvas from 1971 and the beginning of this period, composed entirely of splashes of blue, green, yellow, pink, lavender and white stands as a celebration of life, a tribute to the very power of creation itself. Finally, a diminutive, delightful work on paper presents a colourful parrot in oil pastels drawn over the closing lines of an erotic verse, the whole dedicated with a short inscription to Børge Birch, Danish gallerist and friend of the artist, signed and dated New York City in the spring of 1964.

The 1970’s was a pivotal era for Walasse Ting culminating in everything he had learned up until that point. Having appropriated the impulsive, primitive, and childlike inspiration inherited from his early years in Paris, where he befriended leading members of the short-lived CoBrA group, notably Jorn and Alechinsky, but also Appel and Dotrement, and distilling what he had gleaned from opposing factions of a brave new art world that was mid-century New York – the fierce, emotional, and experimental techniques of the Abstract Expressionists on the one side, and the colourful palette and vibrant aesthetics of Pop Art on the other – he combined them. Perhaps more than anything else, it is Walasse Ting’s bold use of colour, paired with what pop artist Tom Wesselmann calls “onslaught and blobs of paint,” which he effected to develop his own style – sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, usually both, but always original– that stands out most.

Despite their different origins and the cultures, traits and nationalities of the artists behind them, the techniques and results of all these styles and movements – from the fantastical world, experiments and immediacy of CoBrA and the drips, voids and colour fields of Abstract Expressionism to the popular imagery and representational wit of Pop Art – each relate in their own way to the artistic roots and rich cultural heritage that Walasse Ting brought with him from life in China and a carefree
childhood on the streets of Shanghai.

From Ding Xiongquan to Walasse Ting

"Born in Shanghai, China 1929, / 4 years old paint in sidewalk.

10 years old draw on wall. 20 years old left China to traveling after reading book of I-Ching. In 1953 arrived in Paris. Six months later meet Pierre Alechinsky. Six months later meet Asger Jorn. Six months later meet Karel Appel; drink coffee with them Paris-Café. Working all kinds of jobs to make very simple living. Live in a six-inch window room. Paint there. Eat there. In 1963, arrived in New York. Six months later meet Sam Francis. Six months later meet Tom Wesselmann. Six months later meet Claes Oldenburg. Eat hot and sour soup with them in Chinese restaurant. Not working any kinds of jobs. Sleeping all day in sixty-foot window loft. Eat there. Paint there. Self-taught. Individual. Not belong to any group."

Walasse Ting, exhibition catalogue, Lefebre Gallery, New York 1971

The poignant simplicity of these lines, composed in Walasse Ting’s uniquely sparse English, unmistakably conveys the nomadic nature of a young man on the move, of a cosmopolitan in search of like-minded people, unfettered by familial expectations or the rigid conventions of one’s own nationality. It also reveals an artist who, in his search for the company of other artists, always found himself in the right place at the right time with exactly the right people. “Open, generous, impulsive,” Walasse Ting’s inquisitive nature and artistic determination led him to successfully bridge the gap between the ancient Chinese aesthetics of his native culture, the postwar avant-garde of Europe, and both the rawness of Abstract Expressionism and enthusiasm of Pop Art in America in the fifties and sixties. When the centre of the art world shifted from
Paris to New York, Walasse Ting moved right along with it, by chance or otherwise, bringing with him, as always, the Far Eastern sensibility of his youth.

Walasse Ting, born Ding Xiongquan in 1928 (or 1929, according to the poet’s account above), was influenced early on by Chinese pictorial tradition, poetry, both classical and modern, Chinese opera, and especially, as a self-taught artist who learned and loved to draw on the walls and sidewalks of his native Shanghai, the street and all its popular pictorial norms. While having attended only briefly the Shanghai College of Fine Arts – it went against his nature – much of Walasse Ting’s style and indeed his earliest memories are rooted in the technique and proliferation of traditional Chinese engravings still very much alive throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Exposure to popular urban art forms, most commonly promotional material, posters and placards for festivals, political proclamations, advertising campaigns and anything else one might
wish to promote in a thriving pseudo-capital, made a lasting impression on the youth.In addition to city life and its influences, Walasse Ting also became acquainted with rural traditions when, at the age of nine, he was sent to his family’s ancestral village as a precaution in 1937 during Japanese air raids on Shanghai. Here he was met with artistic customs that were significantly different from what he was used to in Shanghai. These traditional influences, too, would serve him well.

Life in Shanghai before, during and after the war brought with it important influences from the West, which not only provided lasting sources of inspiration but also served as an ideal destination for the budding young artist. Contact with the European avantgarde through reproductions in contemporary art magazines and books stimulated and fed his imagination. It filled him with images and ideas that gave him a taste for the exotic and foreign, while providing him with the necessary wanderlust to push his art and mind in ever-new directions.

Europe, however, was still a long way off. In contrast, Hong Kong, still under British rule, was a logical first stepping stone. In 1946 he moved south to Hong Kong, a move that offered the eighteen-year old an escape from a civil war that was simmering in China.
The postwar colony was an exciting place to be, a haven for refugees and expatriates, artists and entrepreneurs; the city’s great optimism, energy and rejuvenation were the perfect catalyst for a period of intense study, during which he could make connections and hone his craft. After some initial success exhibiting watercolours at local bookstores, he finally had his first official exhibition at Hong Kong’s Hotel Cecil in 1952. The exhibition, billed as “Modern Paintings in Eastern and Western Styles by Mr. Walasse Ting”, combined Chinese subjects and techniques with a Western aesthetic and pointed towards a brand
of abstraction that was contemporary with what was happening in Europe at the time, and specifically in Paris.

With a new life came a new identity, and “Walasse” was chosen over Xiongquan because it echoed Shanghainese pronunciation of Matisse. The combination of a Chinese surname with a Westernised first name was common among the diaspora, and Ting’s homage to Henri Matisse was no accident. The painter deeply admired the Fauvist master and saw
in him a kindred spirit in colour and an innovator of pictorial space, a combined model of artistic expression that would remain a major influence on all his work.

Friendships and Artistic Collaboration: Paris

Walasse Ting set sail for Europe in 1953 and spent the next six years as a struggling artist in the French capital. He immersed himself in the city’s secular art scene, absorbing the influence of modern and contemporary Western art, and studying modern masters such as Matisse and Picasso. It was a life of poverty and hardship arriving in Paris via Marseilles
without a passport and only $5.00 in his pocket, an existence that necessitated “all kinds of jobs to make very simple living. Live in a six inch window room. Paint there. Eat there.”

Paris, like Hong Kong in Asia, was the place to be in postwar Europe. Especially for a painter and poet who sought to broaden his horizons in search of new ways of seeing the world. One who wished to express the light and darkness of a life lived in it and who was open to experimentation and the acquisition of new techniques. Walasse Ting sought to capture both the hard and soft sides of humanity, with all the desires and impulses, longings and urges that make life worth living. It’s of little consequence that he arrived in Europe with hardly a friend or contact to his name. As countless people often remarked,
including Eberhard W. Kornfeld, the future publisher of 1¢ Life, “he had a gift for making friends everywhere” (Walasse Ting.The Flower Thief, exhibition catalogue, Musée Cernuschi, Paris, 2017, p. 45). He came to Paris in search of Matisse and Picasso.
He found Alechinsky, Jorn and Appel.

It was a mutually beneficial stroke of good luck to befriend the founding members of CoBrA and through them their Danish gallerist Børge Birch. Fruitful relationships that over the next six years – and ultimately throughout their lifetimes – would not only lead to a new direction in Walasse Ting’s art but also help to establish his reputation in Europe and abroad. The artists first met in 1954-1955 and according to Walasse Ting all within six months of each other. Their aesthetic affinity, particularly their love for the similarities between painting and writing, drew them together. Their discussions – “drink coffee with them Paris-Café” – and experimental collaborations kept them close.

Especially Pierre Alechinsky; for Walasse Ting, there was no one closer.

A deep friendship developed between the two artists as their many sources of mutual inspiration grew. Alechinsky, a self-professed “painter through printmaking,” was studying book illustration and typography around the time he and Ting met. It was Ting’s knowledge of Asian calligraphy that led Alechinsky to adopt Chinese ink-and-brush techniques; Ting’s calligraphic fluidity blended easily with Alechinsky’s own raw, gestural style, and his transition from traditional Chinese academic art to a more spontaneous, emotional style was in turn aided by the Belgian’s technique and knowledge of printmaking.

Later in the 1960s and arriving in New York, Alechinsky stayed with his friend, where they lived, worked, and collaborated side by side in Ting’s studio. A prolific period that produced numerous so-called “four-handed” paintings, executed on rice paper, which they playfully dubbed “Alechings.” There were also publishing projects, most notably the seminal 1964 book 1¢ Life – a definitive visual manifesto of the 1960s, containing a portfolio of prints by 28 different artists. Other collaborations include with Asger Jorn, and on at least one occasion with both Jorn and Alechinsky, where the three friends worked together on a painting that was later reworked by Alechinsky years after Jorn’s untimely death in 1973, and which now hangs in the artist’s museum in Silkeborg.

Alechinsky played a central role in promoting Ting’s work. He introduced him to Børge Birch, the famous CoBrA gallerist in Copenhagen, and thus recommended that Birch present a solo exhibition of Walasse Ting’s work in his newly opened gallery.

Asger Jorn and Børge Birch

Of the great many artists Børge Birch knew and supported, Asger Jorn was perhaps his closest friend and contact. A close collaboration had existed between the two Danes since the 1930s, and they shared a taste for the expressive, primal style of the European avant-garde that manifested itself in the circle of artists associated with the short-lived CoBrA movement. Birch helped to nurture the group, by curating, promoting and exhibiting their work in Copenhagen, and Jorn often played a leading role in introducing Birch to new art and new artists. Walasse Ting was no exception.
Børge Birch, always on the lookout for new talent, visited Jorn in Paris in 1959. He was on a major tour of the continent scouting new talent for a major Danish collector, but he was also keeping an eye out for new names to bring back to his own contemporary gallery, which was set to reopen the following year. As usual, Jorn had planned an itinerary and decided which artists and galleries to include in Birch’s visit. It was no coincidence that Birch found himself in a restaurant where one of Walasse Ting’s works was prominently displayed. It was a eureka moment for the gallerist.

"The first time I saw a painting by Walasse was in Paris in 1960.
Asger Jorn took me to a restaurant where there was a large, excellent picture of Walasse. That day I knew who the greatest was."

Børge Birch, Walasse Ting exhibition catalogue, Galerie Birch, 1975

No small words. Birch was completely captivated by Ting’s talent, his easy assimilation of styles, his spontaneity, raw poetic abstraction and, not least, his experimentation with robust lines, powerful gestures and space that would recontextualize traditional Chinese ink-and-brush techniques into something fresh and authentic. Walasse Ting held his first European solo exhibition at Galerie Birch in December 1960, just weeks after he turned 31. It featured 19 paintings and eight ceramic plates and sold out on the first day. The Copenhagen exhibition helped to mark a turning point in the wake of the aspiring artist’s arrival in New York and paved the way for future exhibitions in Denmark and on the continent. Birch’s support over the next two decades would prove crucial in promoting the New York-based artist, cementing his legacy in Europe, and coaxing him away from his darker ink-based works to what would become the wildly successful, colourful palettes of cats, women and birds that defined his later career.

Liberation and Culmination: New York

"30 years old first time come to America …"

Walasse Ting, Lefebre Gallery, 1971

Was Walasse Ting 30 or 31 when he arrived in New York? In his early thirties is much closer to the truth than 35, as he is quoted elsewhere in this article. Walasse Ting’s account of years and dates should be understood from a poetic rather than a factual time frame, and while some sources state that he arrived in New York in 1957, others state that he arrived in 1958 or early 1959. Regardless of the year, Ting wasted no time in setting up a studio in Manhattan on West 25th Street in the bohemian neighbourhood of Chelsea, neither ill-timed nor out of place in an area already teeming with intellectuals and artists of all kinds.

New York was a step up after six years of near-poverty in Paris; Walasse Ting’s Chelsea studio had a liberating effect on the industrious young artist. The impact of exchanging the cramped Parisian “six inch window room” for a “sixty foot window loft” in downtown Manhattan must have been profound. Not only did it give the artist more space in which to live, sleep, and eat – as mentioned in the lines above – but also a greater surface area on which to paint, write and create. There is no better illustration of this than the room-sized safe located on the premises, which Alechinsky dubbed as “The Library” in a humorous text written in 1967 (published in his Roue libre for Skira in 1971) describing his friend’s studio. The sizeable New York loft provided Ting with the space and privacy to display an integral source of inspiration that would help to push
his art in new directions. The female nude. More than just nudes, Ting’s “Library” was dedicated to eroticism. East meets West, where carved female figures displayed on a domestic altar were dedicated to the American “beauties” that lined the interior walls, pin-ups, hundreds of erotic photos of women in various poses taken from the pages of “girlie” magazines. All of this coincided with a much-publicized case that legalized the sale of sexually explicit material to consenting adults that same year. Once again, Walasse Ting finds himself in the right place at the right time, and for an artist and poet in whose work the use of eroticism played such a central role, albeit until then only covertly, this newfound freedom and the influence it had on popular culturewere crucial.

Upon his arrival in New York from Paris, Walasse Ting’s figurative and abstract style, like that of the disbanded CoBrA movement he adhered to, was an aesthetic and eclectic mix. But more than that, there was for him and his friends in Paris and New York alike, a shared underlying interest in Far Eastern philosophy and an understanding of their work as a corporeal engagement between hand, body and brush. A dual discipline, both physical and philosophical, that guided their taste, technique, style and output, both individually and collectively.

The artists of the time – from the disbanded CoBrA movement that Walasse Ting adhered to, to the new friends and contacts he made in New York – were held together by more than just an aesthetic and eclectic mix of figurative and abstract styles. There also existed between them a shared and underlying interest in Far Eastern philosophy, a mutual understanding of their work as a physical engagement between hand, body and brush. Theirs was a dual discipline, both physical and philosophical, that guided their taste, technique, style and output, both individually and collectively.

One Cent Life

"One of the boldest international and collective editorial enterprises for bibliophiles."

Pierre Alechinsky, “Vadrouille á l’âge lithique”, Remarques marginales, Paris 1994, p. 46

Sam Francis was the first and most influential connection Walasse made in New York, and like Alechinsky, the two would become lifelong friends. Francis, a well-established second-generation Abstract Expressionist, was known for his vibrant, large-scale works focused on color, light, and vast white spaces, whose style bridged American abstraction with European Art Informel and Eastern philosophy. In other words, Ting and Francis were a perfect match; it’s uncanny how their paths never crossed until they were both living in the United States. Both artists had their roots in Paris in the 1950s, and although they began their artistic careers separately, they were both mutually acquainted with Pierre Alechinsky and Karel Appel. Both were influenced by postwar abstract expressionism, and while Francis was not heavily swayed by the avant-garde CoBrA movement, their circles certainly overlapped. They both explored the intersection of Western action painting and Asian ink-brush techniques, focusing on spontaneity, free-flowing painting, and the execution of works on a large scale.

Finally, both artists consciously pursued the act of leaving physical voids in their work, creating a dynamic balance between filled, colourful areas and empty “real-and-unreal” spaces and voids.

The fact that Ting arrived on the Parisian art scene as a penniless, struggling artist just as Francis was firmly establishing himself there is probably what prevented their paths from converging. Not so in New York, where Ting, an expert in making new contacts and already having made a name for himself in Europe, immediately got to work. His arrival coincided with Francis’ return from Europe and Asia. (He had come to New York to open a new studio in Chelsea and expand the multiple locations he had in California and abroad.) Francis’ arrival also coincided with a utopian idea that occupied Ting day and night. In what was to be no small feat, Walasse Ting wanted to publish a book, a revolutionary, affordable, and collaborative art portfolio that would illustrate his own poems and capture the zeitgeist of an era.

"In his book of poems, 1¢ Life, Ting succeeded in assembling the most divergent artitsts imaginable, to iullustrate the volume. Artists who probably would never want to sit at the same table, found themselves together between the covers of
this book. […]
It would be difficult to name anybody else who could have accom-plished this kind of cooperation but at this very precise second of time in which the book was born, Ting very uniquely related to all the manyfold tendencies alive at this moment."

John Lefebre (Ting’s New York gallerist), The Flower Thief, p. 46

After six months of endless conversation, the industrious duo set out to make Walasse Ting’s dream project a reality: a unique publication that would unite his own art and poetry with those of nearly 30 of his contemporaries in one collective spirit. The book would include European and American artists of widely varying styles, Francis and Alechinsky would be joint editors, and Francis, as a sign of his success as well as his altruism, would finance the purchase of the seventeen tons of white paper needed for its production.

One Cent Life was published in 1964, two years after they met. A landmark publication for its time, it presented a virtual catalogue of the most important and divergent artists of the day, with 62 colourful loose-leaf lithographs representing the widest range of styles from Tachisme and Neo-Dadaism, through CoBrA and all forms of abstraction to Pop Art. It was printed in Paris – a complex feat, considering that all the artists involved, half of whom came from the United States, had to travel there to produce works on lithographic stone – and published in Bern, Switzerland, in an edition of 2,100 copies (100 of which were signed). Ting’s unique ”art book of poems” stands as an ode to the joyful, energetic collective dream of the 1960s and was embraced by the art world on both sides of the Atlantic. “Where can I find a book as exciting as Times Square, colour as bright as neon light, hot as espresso …,” Pierre Alechinsky noted upon its publication, “[it is] one of the boldest and collective editorial enterprises [imaginable].” (Quoted in Walasse Ting, Near 1¢ Life, Art News, No. 65, 1966)

Many other books would come from the artist-poet’s hand, but none would signal the seismic shift that shook the art world – as American Abstract Expressionism was being swept away by the unstoppable tsunami of Pop Art – as effectively as 1¢ Life. Nor could anyone else embrace both movements within the corners of a single canvas or the edges of a piece of paper as effortlessly as Walasse Ting.

Walasse Ting’s Great Synthesis

From his arrival on the Chelsea scene until well into the 1970s, Walasse Ting personified the bohemian melting pot of the New York art world better than probably anyone else. The Chinese-American artist always seemed to feel at home, bridging cultures and adopting a diversity of artistic styles, techniques and disciplines wherever he went.
Endlessly curious and open to new contacts and ways of collaborating, he was never the type to elevate or isolate himself professionally, mostly because he felt naturally embraced by everyone he met – and based on the accounts of the gallerists and artists, friends and family he surrounded himself with, the feeling was happily reciprocated.

Walasse Ting quickly became a charismatic part of the community. His dinner parties are legendary: boisterous and influential gatherings of established and emerging artists, catalysts for a lively cross-pollination of cultures, personalities, influences and inspirations. It was here that he met influential pop artists, notably Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann, all of whom would help illustrate 1¢ Life. But it was in Tom Wesselmann’s work that Walasse Ting landed the right combination of ingredients – the stylization, the motifs and the lavish burst of colour – that he needed to shape a single new expression in a synthesis of everything he had experienced, learned and executed in the twenty years leading up to this point.

Women like Clouds – Nudes from the Seventies

No other artist’s work explored the liberated female libido with such vivacity and unabashed bravado as Tom Wesselmann’s celebrated series, The Great American Nude, a collection of large-scale works executed over a period of twelve years and
completed in 1973. He depicted the female nude, at times larger than life, reclining in flattened two-dimensional interiors together with consumer products and patriotic emblems in red, white, and blue. The artist’s treatment of the body and the reduction of space to two dimensions create a bold aesthetic tension. By flattening the body, he depersonalizes it. By eliminating all redeeming features except mouths, nipples, and genitals, he erases any form of physical and personal identity. Pop art, by objectifying the world and its inhabitants through such cool, calculated detachment, transforms its subjects into commodities, while in the case of Wesselmann’s nudes, embuing them with heightened, albeit anonymous, sexuality. On the one hand, Wesselmann’s canvases vividly capture the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the attendant commercialization of sex. On the other, these colorful two-dimensional icons stand as a bold critique of American advertising, consumerism, and the postwar “bikini culture.”

When presented with Walasse Ting’s many colorful nudes from the height of the 1970s, it is easy to see how he was influenced by Pop Art. Like Wesselmann’s Great American Nude, Ting’s eroticized models adopt explicit poses, sometimes with extreme candor and directness. Nevertheless, Walasse Ting’s paintings from this period have a very different agenda than Wesselmann’s. The two are literally worlds apart.

Walasse Ting was known, especially in Paris, for frequenting brothels and hiring prostitutes; his New York “Library” was lined from floor to ceiling with pin-ups taken directly from pornographic magazines, yet his explicit and colorful nudes have little
in common with with the pop artist’s depiction of women as objects reserved for consumption. In a 1973 letter to a friend, Ting compared the ensemble of nudes he executed in colorful pastels and paintings for his seminal book Red Mouth, to “women (who), like clouds, seem to step out of movies and magazines” (quoted in The Flower Thief, p. 94). A telling description, and hardly surprising, considering that they are at least partially, if not directly, inspired by the many pictures that lined the walls of his studio library. Ting’s women are undeniably eroticized; they pose and literally spread their legs for the benefit of both artist and viewer. Nevertheless, Ting’s ladies, compared to Wesselmann’s, appear as deeply emotional subjects of femininity.

The cool detachment of Pop Art is replaced with warmth, sensuality, and intimacy; his models exude the romanticism of Eastern ink-wash painting mixed with Western exuberance.

One could argue that Ting’s ladies, although not portraits in themselves, have character and are endowed with individual features and personalities. Their very liveliness and sensuality stand in sharp contrast to Wesselmann’s clinically simplified
two-dimensional women displayed in flat, generic interiors and rendered as desireous consumer products. Walasse Ting recognizes women and flowers as deeply emotional subjects; his work from this period is extremely poetic and organically dense. Ting’s ladies, executed quickly and spontaneously, are surrounded by objects found in nature, blossoms and foliage, cats and parrots. He rarely depicts his women indoors. He paints them either in abstract environments or in the embrace of nature in all its sensual splendor, so much so that the model, enveloped in a multitude of bright, fluorescent flowers and leaves, practically merges with the colors, textures and content of her surroundings. With their spontaneous, emotional explosions of color and femininity, the women Ting paints are a far cry from Wesselmann’s with their cynical built-in criticism and objectification of all things human.

The Subject, the Painter, and the Viewer

"It is not the painting that matters … nor the image once it’s done, it is during the act of painting."

Pierre Alechinsky on Walasse Ting, Roue Libre, Geneva, 1971

"The painting is during. Never before, never after."

Pierre Alechinsky quoting Walasse Ting (Pierre Alechinsky from letter published
in Walasse Ting’s Red Mouth, Paris & New York, 1977)

Ting, like his artist-friends in the CoBrA movement, specifically Jorn, Alechinsky, Dotrement, “emphasised impulse and immediacy in the creative act, rather than the completed creation” (Chang Ming Peng, The Flower Thief, s. 48). Overall, Walasse Ting’s figurative nudes, like many of his works, both Eastern and Western, are multilayered affairs. First painted with broad brushstrokes, quickly and vibrantly, only to be splattered or partially covered afterwards with contrasting colours of paint. As Èric Lefevre points out in his discussion of Ting’s technique and process, “successive layers of paint totally block out the preceding stages of the work,” with “the pleasure of covering, reprising, and subverting” is an inherent “act of painting,” and the resultant work executed, or performed, through “layers of pleasure.” Lefevre even goes so far as to compare Ting’s act of creation to a “sexual act” (The Flower Thief, p. 97).

Walasse Ting’s nudes are hardly dirty pictures, but rather expressions of joy and empathy. What sticks with the viewer is not the nudity and explicit poses, but the artist’s bold and masterful use of color, the carefree power of splashed pigments, acrylic drips, and flowing paint that energize the images seen. In less skilled hands the perfomative technique Ting shares with abstract expressionists from Jackson Pollock to Sam Francis could easily end as a destructive force. On the contrary, his splatters, drips, and splashes intervene in the space of the painting and the model itself. They act as a means to enhance the models’ physical form while simultaneously amplifying the emotional content of the subject, whether it be exuberant joy and hedonism, sensuality and playfulness, or quiet melancholy and vulnerability.

“It’s amazing” Wesselmann writes in praise of Ting’s colourful nudes and the effect of the artist’s abstract devices, “how real they became and the aplomb they maintain in the face of the onslaught of blobs of thrown paint. And those splotches and streaks make the paintings more voyeuristic, like peeking at a nude through a tree branch – and in bursts the painting covers (sic) all over the women who seem to endure it but secretly want to scream with the joy of all that paint.” (Tom Wesselman from letter written in 1974, published in Walasse Ting’s Red Mouth, Paris & New York, 1977).

He is right. Walasse Ting’s nudes are often joyful, coy and coquettish, they flirt, they twist, they pose before a bold monochrome background or a floral setting, yet the erotic nature of his subjects remains elusive. With such an overarching theme of femininity, a persistent hallmark of Ting’s works, no overt sense of eroticism lingers with the viewer after turning their back on a painting. Instead, they are left with the immediacy of the subject, the fantasy and welcomed sensuality of the model or models, aided by all that is good and natural. The abundance of foliage and flowers, often peonies (the peony is a traditional Eastern symbol of femininity, Tang-era courtesans, for example, were known for frequently tucking a large peony in their hair), the intimacy of the pets, cats and birds that surround them, friendship and community.

The “onslaught of blobs of thrown paint” described by Wesselmann, acts as a latticework of dripping and flowing paint that partially covers the model and the space around her. Like an acrylic screen, the dynamic application of running or splattered
paint creates spatial and colorful contrasts to the model depicted behind it. A painterly, abstract medium that effectively gives a festive and joyful expression, where several associations come to mind: cascades of confetti, the starburst of fireworks, raindrops, squirting liquids, or even globs of creative, sticky juices. The presence of such intense colour and “layers of pleasure,” imparts a sense of joy and wonder, and given the immediacy of the figure, one is filled with an unmistakable voyeuristic feeling, not as an invisible voyeur, but as a spectator who, on an equal footing with the both subject and painter, is seen and sensed, appreciated and valued.

Tod Alan Spoerl
Galerie Birch, Copenhagen, June 2026